Tomorrow's ghost

of Faerie: From Spenser to Tolkien'. He's putting in Tolkien because with The Silmarillion just out, and the Carpenter biography, Tolkien-lore will be all the rage.'

She had read The Lord of the Rings, all three volumes of it, because Robbie had adored it, and was always quoting from it. Its awful poetry apart, it had seemed to her an absolutely marvellous adventure story for romantically-inclined 14-year-olds. But since Robbie had been a 24-year-old SAS lieutenant she had never said so aloud for fear of offending him. And if Professor Crowe thought otherwise perhaps Robbie had been right and she had been wrong, in this as in other matters.

Paul looked at her expectantly, with just the faintest touch of innocence waiting for approbation. But she couldn't think of anything to say. She had seen that look on Robbie's face.

He turned back to the road in disappointment. A big sign bearing the legend The North' flashed by.

'Well ... I thought you could probably have a ball in the new Library, talking Tolkien, while Fighting Jack and I sweated on the outside - that's all.' He sniffed.

Frances swallowed. 'Yes, I'm sure I shall, Paul.'

'That's the ticket.' He grinned at her, quickly reassured that he'd been right all the time. 'You can be our Sleeping Princess in the Library, and I shall come and wake you with a kiss when we've killed the wicked O'Leary.'

CHAPTER THREE

There was more than one faerie kingdom, Frances decided nervously as she followed Professor Crowe up the main staircase of the new English Library: hardly ten minutes before, she had left Colonel Butler in one such kingdom of magic and illusion, and she had been profoundly sorry for him; now she herself was entering another, and she would need all her wits about her to play her part in it.

* * *

'Frankly, Mrs Fitzgibbon, I don't know why you are here.'

To which she had wanted for a moment to reply Well, that makes two of us. Colonel, except the way he had said it had somehow suggested to her that he really wished they were both somewhere else, and that had been the beginning of sympathy.

Or perhaps the sympathy had already germinated as she passed through the banks of chattering, flickering surveillance equipment which had been established on the top floor of the half-occupied Science Tower of the new - or fairly new - University of North Yorkshire, and which reminded her of nothing so much as a television studio girding itself to provide live coverage of a Third World War.

In the midst of which sat Colonel Butler.

He wasn't exactly brooding over it all, if anything he seemed to have its operators rather well under his control, from what Frances could observe. But his face, as he glanced past her at them from time to time, bore the same expression of heavily-censored contempt which she had noticed on the face of the American air force general who had once lectured her on the development of one-way remotely-controlled pilotless vehicles (he, who had three times brought back a damaged Phantom from the Hanoi bridges) and the psychological hang-ups of the 'pilots' who 'flew' the RPVs from the depths of their concrete bunkers ('Those goddamn pinball wizards get to like being briefed by computers...').

* * *

'But since you are here I'm putting you into the library, to take James Cable's place.'

No, it wasn't quite contempt. (She had studied the Colonel's face carefully. All the features which had gone to make Charlton Heston a box office idol - the forehead, and the bone structure of cheek and jaw, and the artfully broken nose - added up on his face to ugliness, like a miss that was as good as a mile; yet, at the same time, it was an oddly reassuring ugliness, without any hint of cruelty or brutality.) Not contempt, but rather resigned acceptance of another inevitable change for the worse. So might the 1914

Colonel Butler of Paul's imagination have contemplated a war of machine-guns and trenches, so unpleasantly different from the jolly manoeuvres of Salisbury Plain, but which had to be accepted and mastered nevertheless, and that was that, damn and blast it, with no time for tears.

He was watching her, too - a little warily, as though he was half expecting her to complain about taking over from James at such short notice, or simply because she was a woman, and women tended to be troublesome.

'Very good, sir,' said Frances.

* * *

'Ah-urrumph ... The Library has been designated a safe and secure area. Which means, as a

result of action already initiated, that the probability of an attempt there is ... statistically low.'

Frances remembered what Paul had said, which Colonel Butler was now repeating in the approved jargon as though the words hurt his mouth. And recalling her own first reaction to it she wondered if he was waiting for her to make a liberated protest at being fobbed off, as a mere woman, with a dull job while lucky James was given an opportunity to distinguish himself.

'Yes, sir,' said Frances.

* * *

'Detective-Sergeant Bollard is in charge of the practical arrangements there, and he will

report to you. Your function is ... to assess behavioural deviations - '

The machines hummed and hiccupped and whirred and bleeped at Frances's back, and she knew exactly how Colonel Butler felt as they computed their probabilities and behavioural deviations: the more godlike the technology made him, the more powerless he felt.